Journey to the Center of the Earth

This story was a fun exercise in antiquated geological theories.

Duncan and I listened to Tim Curry’s reading of Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, originally published 1864.

(It’s Sunday, which means that you get my YOBC updates. This particular selection was for last September’s YOBC but I didn’t get to it until this January, and since LittleRed is doing her Vintage Sci-Fi month I thought the mention now would be timely.)

The first words I use to describe this novel are “Quaint” and “Cute”.

First, Tim Curry, as you might expect, does a fantabulous job narrating this novel. Yes, *that* Tim Curry. The narrator alone is enough for this audio production. I love when he actually pronounces the cryptogram!

I’m going to skip over the basic synopsis of the story, I think you’re familiar enough with it. The synopsis is exactly as the title states.

What was fun for two scientists with heavy geology backgrounds was the re-cap of the outdated geological sciences. At the time of this publication, geology was new as a science, and in fact, “science” was new. Scientists were just starting to call themselves that, moving over from the previous nomenclature of Naturalists.

For quick reference, an abbreviated timeline:

• circa 1650: Steno’s laws of stratigraphy
• 1795: Hutton’s two volumes on Theory of the Earth
• 1830: Lyell’s Principles of Geology
• 1859: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
• 1864: Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth
• 1870-1890-ish: Cope and Marsh together catalogue more than 130 previously unknown dinosaur species in what was known as the “Bone Wars”
• 1960s: development of the concepts of plate tectonics

So, in this novel, the scientific theory under debate concerns the constitution of the inside of the globe.

People had been mining already for time immemorial, digging into the earth was nothing new. It is in fact, true, that there’s a perceptible raise in temperature that correlates with decent. Our knowledge of the materials of the earth have expanded so much in the past thirty years that even my Awesome and Non-Award Winning 2nd Grade Science Fair Project diagramming a cross-section of the Earth is invalid.

The uncle is utterly convinced that the center of the earth is hollow and supporting of life. It’s a fun science history trip to see how he justifies all this nonsense through measurements taken with his state of the art scientifical instrumentation: a barometer, a thermometer, a chronometer, a manometer and a compass, the last of which proved to be true, despite its mis-reading leading to a mis-leading.

As we walk down the caverns into the globe, we get a Victorian understanding of the make-up of the Earth and the debates that raged in the scientific societies. Is the earth more than 4000 years old? Are all rocks derived from sedimentation? If the critters were enormous, the ancient people must have been enormous, too (because, surely, there was never a time when there were no people, right?)

The debate takes place between Axel and the Uncle Otto Lidenbrock. Axel is usually right, in the modern understanding of geology–and for basic survival too, I might add–and his argument takes one side of these scientific debates. For example, Axel knows they’re going the “wrong way” when he’s dying of thirst (the big baby) because they find coal. The uncle had a very firm stratigraphic map in his head, which probably was only valid for Europe. They traveled from the Stratigraphic Period to the Granite Period to the Primitive Rock, downward, into a very static and unchanging Earth. Under this static interpretation, there was only ever one singe “coal period” for all of time and ubiquitous across the globe.

Listening to Tim Curry narrate these adventures, I can absolutely hear Verne exploring these ideas for himself. And I could make a pun about ” Pictures of Horrid Rocks”, but I’m going to go finish Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table so that I can regale you tomorrow with more stories of old science.